Sorry it is taking me a billion years to get through all the questions you all sent me waaaaaay back when. The good news is the ones I have answered so far have really helped me work through some of the open adoption related angst I was feeling. The bad news is, I am kind of burned out from all the over processing. I will get to them, though. I just might have to answer a few a week interspersed with other stuff until I get done.A few more:Sky asks:
As a stay at home mum, I sometimes feel like I am wasting my talents. Do you ever feel that or other mummy guilt?I don’t think I really have any work-related talents, unless you consider the ability to look busy while really surfing the internet to be a talent. That was what I most excelled at in most of my previous jobs.
Oh, and I also have a serious talent for remembering the appearance, layout and sale history of every single house that has sold in my neighborhood in the past four years. I love houses so much I have even considered becoming a realtor one day, but it wouldn’t be until the kids are much older or maybe even off to college.
My primary work-related guilt involves the fact that I hate cleaning the house. I have a nagging belief that since I am here all day, I should do more cleaning and upkeep but I just don’t like to do it. Maybe next year when L goes to kindergarten, I will do a better job cleaning the house. Or maybe I will get a part-time job so someone else will clean it.
S’s Mom asks
do you use the term “hapa”? I think it would feel strange saying it. Likewise my relative is black/Asian and I would feel strange saying Blasian to her. I just say biracial or multiracial.
have been introducing the idea of “hapa” to M. I made her watch a hapa organization video on youtube last month. She was kind of uninterested, but you know, she is eight. She is very comfortable with the idea that she is “Chinese and white” or “Asian and American” (her words, not mine).
While there are more half or part Asians around than there used to be (especially where we live in the Midwest), M is still a pretty small minority. She has a friend at school who is also half-Chinese and I have heard them talking about what exactly
“half chinese” means before. Clearly, it means
something to her.
.
M is going to live a life where she passes as white most of the time. She is well-aware that Chinese people do not see her as Chinese, but our family considers her to be Chinese/Taiwanese (or maybe Asian/ Asian American). She knows that Chinese people don’t see her as much Chinese at all. Her father’s Asian identity is very important to him. That the kids have an Asian identity is important to him. While that racial identity is important in our family, culturally we are not very Chinese/Taiwanese. Culturally, we are mostly American with a little Chinese around the edges.
M’s experience as a mixed-race person is unique in our family. Every other person in our near extended family is either white or Asian (though she does have some cousins who are Taiwanese/Korean American which is its own mix). I don’t know yet what that will be like for her. I am sure at times it will be difficult, but I am confident that in the end M will be able to figure it all out.
.
I like the idea of “hapa” because there has been so much hapa activism lately (
here,
here,
here, and
here for example). I like the idea of M knowing how to find people who have shared her experience of being mixed race Asian if she wants to. I like the idea of one word that can encompass a bit of her experience rather than the unwieldy ”third generation Chinese American and white, raised in the Midwest, doesn’t speak much Chinese, etc.”
.
We also talk generally about mixed-race people, too, but introducing M to the idea ”hapa” is more specific. I don’t know how she will identify as she gets older, maybe she will think of herself as hapa, or mixed race or maybe just white. It isn’t up to me. I just put the ideas out there and see what sticks. Also, I don’t generally say she is hapa to other people because I assume they won’t know what it means.
When I asked the kids if they are white or Chinese they both said Chinese. One kid said she is Chinese all year but white in the winter? We live a fairly blended life. We eat mostly Asian food, we watch a lot of Chinese tv, the man reads and speaks in Cantonese. Unfortunately now that we live Outside of Boston we know barely any Asian people.
Thank you!
For a while I wanted to get my son a t-shirt that says “Happy to be Hapa”. But then I thought…No….I don’t KNOW that he is happy to be hapa. He can make the decision to get such a t-shirt on his own.
This topic reminds me of a very cool book I saw when my local children’s museum hosted the “RACE” exhibit. The book was called, “Part Asian – 100% Hapa.” It’s a series of portraits of hapa people of all ages and complexity of blends, each portrait with a personal statement by the subject on what it means to them to be hapa on the facing page. What an incredible sampling. I had serious book envy.
Hi – very interesting hapa response. I (caucasian-female) grew up in Hawaii and met and married a chinese-male who grew up in Wisconsin. The hapa word is part of my vocabulary (as is haole). Our daughter looks more Asian than caucasian at this point (age 11) especially to non-asian americans. She is working on figuring out where she fits and how she classifies herself. We have just been thru a irritating but almost comical situation with the school system. The kids this year have been told to go online all the time to check their grades. My kid, mostly using this as a chance to get on the computer, does this obsessively. Well right there on the homepage which lists demographics she is listed as Asian. When I registered her for school we were told that we could only check one box and as her last name is Chinese I chose Asian – but complained all the way up to the state that this was not right. Four years later we were told we could check as many boxes off as we want – so we checked Asian and Caucasian. I thought it would default to multi-racial as that is a reporting box on one of the standardized tests. Unfortunately it only shows the first box you checked – which I guess was Asian. DD asked me to fight it and as I wasn’t too busy that week I made a few calls and the person said they saw that I checked two boxes but again multi-racial (or other) was not a choice. I left it at that. By the way they asked to me check which one she is “more of”??? The next time dd went in to check her grades she yelled “Mom what did you do? Now they have me as White!” It is obviously a computer programing issue – but it bugs the heck outta my kid. She is now writing a letter to the Secretary of Education expressing her concern. It is all very interesting to us to see how we can support her choices with out actually making them for her.
2 hapa kids in AM’s class. You know, in our corner of the universe.
My biracial kid, you know the one who is almost 13, insists on identifying as brown. He refuses to believe that people think of him as AA. I think this idea will morph, but I also thought it would happen more quickly, like when he began school last year. Strange boy!
@paige Hi, there.
I just wanted to speak up as a twenty-something mixed-race person who happily identifies as brown. I’ve cycled through a lot of labels in my life, but that’s the one I always come back to, because it feels the most accurate. When I used to get that annoying “What are you?!?” question as a teenager (most adults are too polite now), brown was my favorite shut-them-down answer. In my experience, being mixed is not about conforming your self-identification to how other people see you (because that’s a no-win game) but feeling comfortable with how you see yourself.
KT I have also had that problem of only being given one box to check. It is amazing in this day and age.
I like the word hapa, having been introduced to it in Hawaii, which is indeed one of the most multi-ethnic societies in the US. My kids are hapa, of the brown-white kind, that really is unidentifiable except to the best initiated. My kids identify as biracial (especially because their white side is ethnically jewish, which puts them on the outside of whites, too). Right now, their complaint is in the standardized testing in school, where they have to put one race. They complain about the checkboxes enough that I’m going to have to start writing some letters, too.
And, I think that people’s assessment of race is highly context dependent — in my city, the ethnic white population is dominated by nordic heritage, so, especially in children, not being blue-eyed, fair skinned, and light haired makes children look exotic (and, potentially, non-white, since they could be hispanic, native american, asian, south asian, or even southern european).
I struggle with it on and off. Usually it’s a non-issue, completely out of my mind until someone says something uncouth:
“What are you? I mean, where are you from?” “Are you Native American? Italian? Mexican?” When I say I am half Korean, I always get the same response. “Oh you don’t look oriental at all!” When it is pointed out to me that I am “not really american” or “not really korean” it sends me into a period of self examination and re-identification. Sometimes even self loathing.
The worst thing someone can do is act like it doesn’t matter, say that I’m making too much of a big deal out of it. The best thing someone can do is address me as someone who is ACCEPTED into whichever racial identity was denied me by the originator. “You know the high school I’m talking about, you’ve lived in PA your whole life.” or “You’re Korean. What kind of korean food do you think my friend should try first?”
I’m blessed with a husband (15 years) who “gets it”. When he sees me moodily surfing Hapa websites, he treats the family out to the korean restaurant or asks me when the last time I called my mom was.
Hi there,
I saw on another blog that you wrote that you opened your Chinese daughter’s adoption. May I ask how you did that? My daughter really wants to meet her bio family when we go back to China.
Can you email me at cormier_nicole24@hotmail.com
Thanks
Nicole
Merry Christmas, AmFam!